Happy New Year!

Don't fret, people! Our month long hiatus is over and (semi)regular posts will resume! I know you're all jumping for joy now. try and contain yourselves long enough to read how the end of 2008 was and what we've been up to. :) joking of course.

well, lets see, the last time I posted it was snowing. Guess what, snowing again! We actually missed the big, city-halting snow while we were in Colorado enjoying the sunshine. I think Portland got 1-2 FEET of snow. That's pretty amazing for us here. All I can say is thanks goodness for a garage so Brandon doesn't have to scrape the car in the morning:)

We left for vacation on December 18th which was also my last day nannying for Sam :( It's always hard to stop working with a family and to not see the kids regularly, but fortunately for me Sam's family has already asked me to come back for a reoccuring date night:) Anyways, back to vacation. We spent the first 6 days (until Christmas day at 1pm) with my family in Monument and the next 6 days with Brandon's family in Denver. It was a great time of eating, relaxing, friends, games, eating, serving, and eating.
Here we are with my family on Christmas Eve serving dinner at the Rescue Mission.

Here are the boys competing in the annual gingerbread house competition.

We don't really have any good pictures from Brandon's parent's house. His dad is a super photographer so we are going to wait and steal some of his:)

We were able to see some of Brandon's old friends from the college days.One of the couples,Phil and Anna, brought their 3 day old baby...yay!

And we were able to carpool and spend a little extra time with our friends, Landon and Hannah. We love their company. It's so refreshing to be around people who know you and share your heart.

I also got to spend an entire day with my best friends from high school. We are all in different states now (WA, OR, CO, and PA) but are just as close now as we were then. They are amazing girls and it's so fun to see how we've all grown in the last 8 or so years.
SARAH--can i have pictures from Tuesday?? Please??:)

Well, that was our vaca in a nutshell. Now we are back home and about to jump into another semester. We spent this weekend de-Christmasing our house, de-cluttering our storage, re-caulking our bathtub, and doing some New Year cleaning. I start my new job tomorrow. Brandon starts classes tomorrow. More updates on how those are going later. And things are back in full-swing!
I hope everyone who is reading had a FANTASTIC holidays and experienced Christ to the fullest as you celebrated his birth.
HAPPY 2009 EVERYONE!!!